Chapter 131 – The Baron of the Night

After a violent rocking earlier, the ship was now much more stable overall than it had been a moment ago, and although it did undulate a little, it was at least passable in the corridor.

The two held onto the walls of the stairway all the way down to the bottom of the ship, which was the cargo hold, where one crate after another was held in place by a variety of ropes, hooks, planks, and so on, but it was obvious that some of them had come loose.

There had been some broken wood shavings and glass on the floor, perhaps a box had been broken.

A few of the passengers also came to the bottom of the ship, seemingly also lured by the sudden commotion that had just occurred.

“Where’s Gazik?” Grid asked.

“Who is Gazik?” The opposite side asked.

“It’s the ship’s first mate.” Another passenger replied, and asked, “Why ask him, was he here earlier?”

Jess said, “We watched him run here, wasn’t he the one who just yelled?”

“If he shouted it.” A passenger said, “Then who died?”

Grid surveyed the interior of the cabin and asked, “The question is where are the dead?”

The five or six men here looked at me and me at you, no one knowing what to do, and it wasn’t long before they all coincidentally looked deeper into the cabin on the other side of the ship, once again staring at each other in disbelief. The tall man with the carrying lamp in his hand took a deep breath, then took a step deeper.

The crowd followed his lead, rocking rhythmically back and forth on the swaying boards, and before long a few more passengers ran below and gazed this way.

As he walked, Grid came to an abrupt halt, the people behind him observing the goods too closely, and someone else bumped into Jace, causing Jace to nearly push Grid out in front of him again.

Grid waved his hand, twitched his nose, and said, “I smell blood.”

Hearing the smell of blood, a couple in the back unconsciously took a step back, and a few of the bolder ones around the dwarf were a bit nervous.

The leader in front of him turned back and lowered his lamp to shine on the waterlogged floor, and all of a sudden found a little imperceptible blackness.

A flash of scarlet stood out from all this blackness as the carrying lamp approached.

“What is this …… red wine?”

The dwarf stared back at him, dipping his finger and licking it as he rubbed it down.

“Unfortunately, human, you guessed wrong.”

At Grid’s words, the group took a step back, one cursed something in a distinctly Lordaeronian accent, and the others dared not move forward.

Grid took the carrying lamp from the man’s hand and continued on, and Jace followed him. No one was afraid of blood, of corpses, the reason why they were afraid to move forward was because it was obvious that the murderer didn’t know who, or rather, what, it was yet.

The ocean of Azeroth is never calm, countless strange creatures lurk in it, and the most menacing are undoubtedly the nagas at the bottom of the sea, if a group of naga killers have already climbed onto the ship, then the ship is definitely going to be in big trouble.

Jace sniffed around carefully, there wasn’t the slightest hint of the fishy smell of naga scales, instead a foul odor from nowhere filled the cabin, it wasn’t like something you could smell at sea at all.

Hearing Jace keep sniffing at something, Grid said quietly, “Even you felt it, didn’t you? That stench.”

“Right.” Jess said, “What do you think it is?”

“I have a guess in mind, but I’m afraid I’ll sound like a fool when I say it.” The dwarf narrowed his eyes.

“Go ahead.” Jess said, “I have an answer in mind, too.”

“Then we’ll both say it together.”

“Good.”

“Tiger.”

The two men spoke in unison, and the dwarf gave Jace a surprised look and asked, “Where have you smelled a tiger before?”

Of course Jess couldn’t have said it was a zoo and just said, “Never you mind, just what’s with the tigers here?”

Grid frowned and shone the carrying lamp on ahead.

After walking for a while longer, the blood on the ground was growing, and they were getting closer to the body, which meant they were getting closer to the murderer as well.

Near the bottom of the ship, the carrying lamp finally illuminated the owner of all that blood; a goblin was lying there, his body so ripped that he couldn’t even see what it had been.

“Is this Gazik?” Jace asked.

“I’m afraid not.” Grid said, “The clothes aren’t quite the same, and this is the one tending the goods.”

“Who killed him?”

Grid shone his carrying lamp back and forth and spotted a grotesque iron cage just a short distance away, obviously tipped over, the lock hanging above the overturned iron door looking as if it had been violently broken, and it was from this cage that the strange odor emanated.

“That.” He pouted his lips in the direction of the cage.

“Why is there such a thing on this ship?” Jace saw the shape of the cage and suddenly remembered the large piece wrapped in cloth he had seen when he boarded the ship.

“Wasn’t that the first one that several people took on board?”

“Seems like it.” A few goblin sailors arrived here at that moment as well, and they had a hard look of eating shit when they saw the broken open cage.

“Where’s Gazik? Where’s your first mate?” Jace asked.

“What are you yelling for? We’re looking for it too!” A goblin sailor shouted.

At that moment, a gnome in a black tunic and shawl came to this, he took one look at the bodies not far away, and another at the blood on the ground, and sighed, “Quickly, everyone to the deck!”

“Aye, Captain Nirazu!”

Is this the legendary Captain?

The sailors left the corridor on command, and this captain looked at the rest and said, “That includes you, too, all of you, leave your cabins and assemble on deck at once!”

One passenger hesitantly asked, “But what about the storm?”

“The storm is nothing compared to the trouble here, damn it, get up there right now, if you want to live!”

The captain growled as he did so, his eyes always glancing to the sides of the cabin, his hand always gripping the gauntlet sword pinned to his waist, looking as if he was ready to put up a fight with something at any moment.

“What the hell happened?” Jace asked.

“Up first.” The captain said pointing to the entrance to the corridor. Coming onto the deck, a couple of goblin sailors were constantly counting the heads of the people below, and Jace roughly figured that there were about a hundred people out here, each thinking about getting up to the mast or railing and holding on tightly, so many people huddled together like a big pile of bacon sausages tied up in bunches by a bunch of rain-soaked bacon sausages.

It was raining hard and the wind was strong, but the captain was right, the storm was nothing for the big ship, and the occasional rocking of the hull was not enough to rock a man overboard.

The real problem was in the bottom of the ship, the one that had led to the deaths of the goblins, but this captain stood tall and listened to the goblins report their numbers, while Jace had noticed that a few of the sailors had already picked up their guns.

Is it really a tiger?

Is there a circus on board? The Dark Moon Circus?

Jace surveyed the passengers around him, there didn’t seem to be a thousand and one of any race like the troupe of the Darkmoon Circus, mostly humans, with only a single digit number of dwarves and gnomes.

“Listen up, everyone.” The captain suddenly shouted, “You are all guests who have paid money to travel on this ship, so no matter what, the Hot Sand Group will guarantee your safety. Now we have a little problem with the cargo warehouse, don’t worry, we will properly deal with this problem before releasing you all back to the guest cabin, everyone work harder to get wet, and in the meantime, you can enjoy the beauty of the storm at sea, not any ship can be so calm to view such a sight, you guys are considered to have earned it.”

“We just want to know what went wrong?!” A male passenger angrily questioned.

“Please calm down, this gentleman!” A goblin sailor shouted, “Whatever problems are going on are now under control.”

Goblins can be so controllable, Jace thought to himself, a goblin blimp falling down as long as the passengers aren’t all killed, as long as there’s one left that can breathe, it’s expected that the goblins would assess this as a controllable accident.

“Is it so hard to give us an answer?”

“We lost a man too, damn it!” Another goblin sailor shouted, “Now keep your composure!”

“Shut up.” The captain yelled, then looked to the crowd and said, “I’m sorry, but in order not to cause any other problems, we’re going to have to …… now.”

“Tell us what’s in that cage!” Grider asked loudly.

Before the goblin captain could reply to Grid’s question, a man suddenly yelled manically, “The cage? It’s the Dark Baron who’s run away! It’s the Night Baron! It must be it! Dammit! I saw it a long time ago, in that cage!”

“Baron Noir? What’s the Black Night Baron?”

“Please don’t get carried away! Don’t listen to rumors! Everything is under control!” The goblin captain yelled, but could no longer stop the chatter at all.

There was a flurry of activity around the room, and Jace sneaked up on Grider and asked, “So what’s this Baron of the Night?”

“I don’t know.” Grider said.

“It’s a black panther.” A nearby noble replied.

He wore a small hat with a brim that barely kept the rain off, and his clothes, despite being soaked through, still showed that the material was expensive.

“I thought it was something.” Grid sneered and said, “Just a leopard, watch me go down and skin it myself later.”

The nobleman glanced at Grid and said, “The Barbarian Hammer Clan?”

“Not bad, you can still see that.” Grid’s tone was a little on the upturned side.

The rain hit the brim of the nobleman’s hat and he blinked, “Do you know the record of the Baron of the Night at the Cape of the Valley of Thorns, your kinsman, the Barbarian Hammer Gladiator, he’s killed three of them.”

Gladiator of the Cape of the Valley of Thorns, this nobleman was referring to only one place – the Gulabash Arena.

The Gulabash Arena is the only place in the Thorn Valley trolls’ territory that is open to outsiders, once it was the great arena within the Gulabash Empire, a place dedicated to providing fun for the nobles, after the empire’s decline those trolls sold part of the operation of this place to the goblins, and since then from the entertainment to the audience is no longer limited to the trolls.

Slowly, the operations around the Gulabash Arena grew, with a variety of related industries popping up all over the place, including, of course, some smaller arenas.

To top it all off, gladiators have sprung up like the rain, and their ultimate goal is to stand on the podium of the Gulabash Arena in the great Thorn Valley cape and reap the rewards of prestige and wealth.

“If that’s really the Black Night Baron.” The nobleman said, “Inside a closed cabin, with cargo, crates, walls, and rooms everywhere …… that black panther is like a killing machine even in the open field, think of how much strength he can muster on this ship. Don’t forget he was known for sneak ambushes back in the Valley of Thorns!”